Hey, what's a nice person like you doin' in a crummy joint like this?

High Wierdness on the web since 1994

What's new? I ran another foot race. See below.

As I look over this page ten years after I first published it, I realize it looks nothing like your garden variety, 21st century ego page --- there are no fancy graphics, no frames, no javascript, no content requiring plugins that only exist for one or two operating systems, just a lot of text and a ton of links. In fact, it still bears the pseudoword "PseudoHotlist," a relic of the day when personal web pages were generally little more than one's bookmark list. I make no apologies. HTML stands for "HyperTEXT Markup Language," not "Gee Whiz Bang Fancy Multimedia Experience Markup Language." I'm a purist curmudgeon, and unlikely to change just because it's the fashion. Down with frames! Down with graphics-only links! Death to intrusive backgrounds that obliterate text! Oh yeah, and down with the categorical imperative!

This site abides by the It is best viewed with a web browser.

Parental warning: you might not want your kid to surf all over these pages, but hey, nothin' but a few gratuitous swear words here, and then it's mostly to poke fun at people who are looking for worse.

Oh, by the way: Suck my Helms, Senator Exon. (Thanks to Tony Quirke)

Die, spambot.

You are visitor number since 1 April 1066.

"You'll Pay to Know What You Really Think"

So what do you do, anyway, Dr. Russo?

Hey, Russo, I have a job for you! Gimme a vita for the personnel office.

What do you think about self-defense, Russo?

What other stuff are you doing?

Running

I ran a second race -- this time a 10K -- on 4 May 2008. It was the NM BioPark Society Run for the Zoo.

Ancient news

In older news, I bought a house in October 2000. Here's a picture of it. Not very detailed, I'm afraid, but that's what you get. I'm the one in the clump of trees to the left of the road just past the bend in the road, about half way down from the top and two thirds of the way across to the right. Can't find it? Not big enough? Take a look at this annotated enlargement.

I've been a volunteer for a local search and rescue team, Cibola Search and Rescue since 1996. In addition to all the other ways I waste my time, I've worn the webmaster's mantle for the team's web site since 1997 and am both an editor of and contributor to the team newsletter, "Lost...and Found". Worse yet, those guys were crazy enough to elect me vice president/training officer for 1999, and were so completely terrified that I'd go postal that they re-elected me in 2000. I also served as president of the team in 2001. But as of 3 November 2003 I'm a New Mexico DPS certified Search and Rescue Field Coordinator (incident commander), so I'm going to be doing more management of search missions than actual searching.

Since I'm spending less time hiking around and more time in search and rescue base, I also joined the New Mexico Search and Rescue Support Team in 2003. I don't field as a mission communicator very often (I wind up serving as incident commander or getting drafted as a section chief even when I show up to work communications) I've taken on the mantle of SAR Support's webmaster and am a member of the board of directors and the team's vice-president, too.

Since I've been collecting SAR team memberships, I also recently joined the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council and have begun training with them, too.

In the summer of 2006 I took the National Inland Search and Rescue Planning School, which made for an intense week of study that I hope will make me more effective at planning long SAR messions in the future.

Thanks to a class from Image Perspectives, I've learned the basics of "realistic injury simulation," and on occasion use these techniques to help make-up simulated injuries for emergency responder drills. My first experience was on the 2002 Albuquerque Sunport disaster drill, where I and several others put make-up on about 100 people to simulate injuries sustained during an aircraft crash. Since then, I've done a few simulated injuries for Cibola SAR's mock searches and litter trainings, and the 2005 Sunport disaster drill. Have a look at my Moulage Gallery.

I'm still a gun-nut, but that's largely a theoretical statement. I used to claim "now and then I shoot at the Zia Rifle and Pistol Club here in Albuquerque." but to continue to claim that would be a shameless, unadorned lie. I still hope that "now and then shoot at" might once again mean more than "occasionally have passing thoughts in my non-existent spare time that I want to think about speculating on the prospect of going to shoot at." Not much chance of that happening soon.

I visited my buddy Anmar in September 1996 and we went hunting. We bagged these nifty round gold things and posed for the Classic Hunter Photo. They didn't make good eatin'.

Every few years I dust off my 35 mm camera and my darkroom equipment. It doesn't happen often, but when I do I sometimes produce stuff I rather like. I don't have many photos up here due to limited storage on this account, but I can inflict some of this stuff on you.

My daughter and I are taking piano lessons. She's been in lessons since late in 1998. I've taken lessons on and off since around 1972, mostly off since 1982, though. Inspired by Kat's attraction to the instrument, I started taking lessons from her teacher in February 2001, as a birthday present to myself.

I don't perform publicly much, but in 2003, my piano teacher and I worked on a duet of P.D.Q. Bach entitled "Sonata Innamorata" ("the only work ever commissioned by Cassanova, presumably to fulfill his motto of 'seductio ad absurdum'"). We even performed it at the East Mountain Artist Series Community Artists Concert on 6 April 2003, and according to the East Mountain Telegraph, we "caused a stir." I guess that was a good thing but with P.D.Q. Bach one can never be sure. The telegraph even used a photograph of us in flagrante delicto in their article. Even though you missed hearing how this hack handled the work, you do have the opportunity to hear how real, professional pianists who actually know their instruments play this piece by going over to Small World Entities and buying their CD American Piano Duets. The rest of the CD is worth paying the $20 for after you hear the few seconds of Real Audio they include on the website. In 2004 we played again at the East Mountain Community Artist Series, this time playing a second piece also on the d.u.o.'s American Piano Duets CD, from Townsend's "Four fantasies on American folk songs." Since then we worked on another duet, Dvorak's Slavonic Dance, Op. 72, No. 2, and a second Slavonic Dance, Op. 46 No. 3. I've also begun working on Gershwin's Rapsody in Blue just thismonth (March 2008), which I expect will take me a long time.

I've been known to get out and hike for no reason. Not often, usually I'm too goal oriented for that --- I need to be out to rescue someone or find a particular spot or get an excuse to prove I'm not Ansel Adams. But I went for a little stroll up the South Crest Trail out of Canyon Estates with my daughter and a friend, and this shot was taken at the Travertine Falls, not far up the trail.

My email address is scattered about on these pages on the off chance you'd like to contact me. Just don't send me any chain letters, or I may have to get nasty Same goes for spam

PseudoHotlist: Some places you might want to nose around

Tilting windmills

My ISP has recently installed SpamAssassin, and following its lead I installed it on my own Unix machines. I highly recommend it --- it's filtering out the 50%-90% of my incoming mail as spam. DEATH IS TOO GOOD FOR SPAMMERS!

Nostalgia:

• Some folks from my high school (Hunter College High School, which has its own Wikipedia entry) have net presences, and a friend assembled a virtual reunion in lieu of attending our 15 year reunion.
• But that was five years ago. Our 20th reunion just happened. My how time flies. Mark Lang set up a HCHS guestbook to mark the occasion.
• Actually, the 20th was several years ago. In fact, the 25th passed us by already. I missed both, and will try to hit the thirtieth when the time comes.

Egofnordtism:

• They scratched my back coz I scratched theirs. fnord Hmmmmmm. It felt pretty nice, so I'll go ahead and see how many cyclic links I can set up between the hyperdiscordia site and mine. fnord

Science Stuff:

• Think you're hot stuff coz you got a degree? Check out The Definitive Statement on Education
• The Irreverend Friday Jones has shown me the light. Check out Why Mad Scientists are better than Scientists.
• The Home Page of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where I worked from January 1993- December 1995.
• The home page of LANL Group T-12, the group in which I was employed back then.
• The Home page of Sandia National Laboratory, where I work now.
• Check out the Astronomy Picture of the Day

Hobby Stuff:

• Confessions of an aging geek

  I have entered my second childhood and begun to enjoy hanging out with my geek friends to play Dungeons and Dragons. As always, I make no apologies. I have also been looking at the open source character generation software PCGen. I have generated a few characters using it, Iirkh ("Stonefist") the Foul, a half-ogre/half-orc barbarian in our "Orcs on a Rampage" campaign (who was killed in a savage battle with a large warband of ogres on 27 Dec 2004. RIP, Stonefist, but all hail his elder, smarter, and nastier half-brother, Gaak Tripod), Amlaib o Cobthaich (char sheet no longer on line), a half-elf pirate rogue in our (long abandoned) on-line play-by-post game, Ynohp Ocac, a human bard in a Forgotten Realms adventure. My friends and I post on the Save the Snotlings Foundation boards, and you can read of our various parties' adventures there.

• Home grown ballistics hack

  A really long time ago I wrote a short ballistics hack to calculate bullet trajectories. I decided to put it on-line for others to use. As is most of my software, it is Unix-only, although you could probably compile it under Cygwin. It is not self-explanatory, although if you run the basic program ("simple") with no arguments it will tell you what arguments it takes. The code is nearly 13 years old and I never put the development effort into it that I'd planned, so here it is, warts and all. All safety and code-quality disclaimers apply --- the code is for recreational use only, and you should verify for yourself whether it provides sufficient accuracy for your purposes.

• I went on a trip to the Grand Canyon and took a bunch of pictures. I've started a little page to share the pictures and a little bit of a trip diary. This time I will make apologies: because the photos wouldn't fit in my regular web account I needed to put this page on a "free" website and there are banner ads visible. Sorry
• I have been known to consider myself addicted to technical rock climbing. When possible, I go climbing at a climbing gym here in Albuquerque, The Stone Age Climbing Gym. And when the forests aren't closed due to extreme fire danger I try to get to a few climbs a year with the New Mexico Mountain Club Climbing Section. I've uploaded a photograph of me climbing a rock formation called "The Ramp" in the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque. [25 Sept 06: This is a very old photo. I have been climbing other things since, mostly little things in the Sandias like "Revenge of the Elderly." I did actually do a climb on Glacier Point Apron in Yosemite in the summer of 2006, a relatively easy climb called "Grack Center." ]
• I was flying real airplanes in a hope to get my private pilot's license. Check out the saga... I never finished, but that's a long story.
• I got in one new flying lesson since packing up my log all those years ago. Check out the description.
• The Backcountry Home Page
• Buy outdoor gear at Campmor
• Or REI

CQ CQ CQ DE KM5VY KM5VY KM5VY K: Amateur Radio Information:

I hang my head in shame, but as of 2003 I now own the Elecraft KPA100 100 Watt power amplifier, and have been known to betray my QRP roots from time to time.

• APRS! I'm getting really into the Automatic Position Reporting System, and use the Xastir package to do my APRS displays. Check out my slowly-growing repository of New Mexico Shape Files, and then go download tons of topo maps from The New Mexico Search and Rescue Resources web site. Xastir can read 'em all.
• Check out the view from my APRS station, updated every five minutes. This is a snapshot from my Xastir display.
• Here I am
• Here might be where my laptop was running aprs last. That usually happens only during rescue missions.
• Here is where I might be if I happen to be carrying a handheld APRS tracker.
• In a fit of narcissistic frenzy, I put my Ham Radio logbook on display. It is really just a copy, so it isn't necessarily up-to-date, but there you have it.
• I'm not a member of the First Class Operator's club, but by golly, I made it into the Second Class Operators Club, and I'm member #236.
• I and several other members of Cibola Search and Rescue received our technician class ham licenses in April 1997.
• Test yourself as you study for the exam using AA9PW's ham exam practice page. I recommend this study tool most of all.
• and if you wanted to learn morse code to get to the Tecnician-with-HF, General or Extra class licences, here's a reference on the Koch method of morse code training. And if you're going to get the new 5WPM General or Extra tickets, you still want to learn faster code, because conversing at 5WPM is about as much fun as watching paint dry. The Koch method will get you there.
• Grab a copy of G4FON's Koch CW Trainer to implement your code training.
• Home Grown Morse Code Hacks
  Frustrated with the fact that I needed to reboot my machine into Windoze to do code practice, and even then have to boot into that god-awful DOS-prompt backward compatibility mode to make the DOS program Supermorse sorta-kinda work in Winblows 98, I wrote some cheezy little hacks for Unix in ANSI C and shell scripts to create Sun-format .au files of morse code. By writing a standard audio file I put all of the timing issues onto the sound drivers --- I simply generate waveforms at a specified sample rate, and leave it to the audio driver to play them at that rate. By the way, don't bother with any of these programs unless you are on a Unix machine -- I assume that they'll be useless on Windoze or MacOS, but who knows? I have only tested these programs under FreeBSD, but since they don't use any machine dependent stuff, they can probably be made to work on any reasonable Unix machine. The shell scripts pipe the output of morse.c into a program called "auplay" --- auplay is a component of the Network Audio System, but if you don't have that you can replace that program with any program that takes a Sun .au file as input and sends it to the speaker, or simply dump the stuff to an audio device.
  • I don't know whether morse.c will compile on your Unix machine, but it should be straightforward to port it. Pipe text in and pipe the output to /dev/audio (or whatever device you have that can play .au files) and you're on your way. If you're going to use the shell scripts below, make sure you compile into an executable named "morse" or change the shell scripts.
  • If you liked that program (and why would you?), you can also do the Koch method by downloading randword.c and the shell script koch. Randword will generate a random stream of characters from an alphabet you provide, and koch will use randword and morse.c to play them. You'll have to edit koch if you don't use the Network Audio System.
  • I also run this shell script in the background now and then and try to copy a Unix fortune every 20 minutes.
  • If you use these and like them, please let me know. If you use them, think they stink, and hate the fact that they are clumsily constructed hacks written in a few minutes with about 2 functioning neurons brought to bear on the problem, please see our complaints department.
  • Compiling under FreeBSD: the two programs here can be compiled pretty easily under Unix. morse.c uses the "sin" function and so needs the math library. Morse.c can be compiled with "cc -o morse morse.c -lm" but randword.c is simpler: "cc -o randword randword.c"
  • Compiling under Winblows 98 This just in! On Tuesday, 27 March 2001 I successfully compiled both randword.c and morse.c under the "Cygwin" environment on Windows 98. Cygwin provides a unix-like API for Winblows programs.

    If you're a technically savvy Windoze user, you can try to compile them yourself. The necessary compiler and DLLs be downloaded by going to the Cygwin website and finding a mirror near you. I installed far more of cygwin than I probably needed. I think all that's required would be the packages bash, cygwin, gcc, and win32api, but I also downloaded binutils. Definitely use the "setup.exe" method of downloading! In your Cygwin bash window you can compile morse.c with "gcc -o morse.exe morse.c -lm". You have to make a simple modification to randword.c because drand48 and srand48 aren't included in the cygwin package: you need to add "#define drand48 ((float)rand()/(float)RAND_MAX)" and "#define srand48 srand" to the top of the randword.c file. Once you make that modification you should be able to compile randword with "gcc -o randword.exe randword.c" You will get two command-line-only programs that you'll need to run in a DOS-prompt window (or with bash). Information on usage of the individual programs is in the source code under "usage." You'll need to use Windoze Media Player to play the .au files produced.

• Looking for used ham equipment? Check out the New Mexico Swapnet each Thursday at 08:30 Mountain time on any of the Upper Rio FM Society or Mega-link repeaters throughout New Mexico and bordering states. Or you can look at the NM Swapnet Page.

Cartoons and other funny stuff

• D&D-related webcomics

  • The Order of the Stick
  • Casual Gamers
  • Goblins
• User Friendly
• Dilbert
• Explore the secret files of Max Cannon in Red Meat

Online Publishing:

• Project Gutenberg
• Albuquerque's free weekly, the Weekly Alibi

Politics and such:

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harrassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. fnord -- P. J. Proudhon

• I'm once again getting riled up about the fnord overextension of governmental power and its abuse. The briefing papers at the Cato Institute website help me to organize my thoughts on the subject (as opposed to just bursting blood vessels in my brain)
• The Libertarian Party page.
• Are we becoming a Nation of Cowards?
• Check out the Library of Congress's Legislative Information Server!

Discordian and Subgenius stuff:

• An old version of The Church of the Subgenius online pamphlet is here, should you wonder what I'm talking about when I mention The First "Bob"tist Church and Loan of New Mexico, Inc. Eternal Salvation --- Easy Monthly Payments. But really, if you want the original, "Bob" approved pamphlet you ought to visit the website of the mother church.
• If you don't see the fnord it can't hurt you. fnord

USENET stuff:

• the soc.singles USENET group (NO PERSONALS!).
• But soc.singles has gone down the path taken by most USENET groups, i.e. that which leads to negligible signal to noise ratios. I have abandoned that group, as have most of the wonderful people I've met through it. We are now congregating in soc.singles.moderated, which has in place software designed to filter out most of the garbage that had polluted the old group. Farewell, soc.singles, long live s.s.m.
• Ross Ridge's Soc.singles web page, which is still mostly relevant to soc.singles.moderated.
• the rec.guns USENET group. This is the group in which to discuss serious gun-nut stuff like ballistics, equipment, competition and self-defense issues. The debates on whether guns are evil or not don't belong there. Amen.
• FAQ this: the list of USENET Frequently Asked Questions Lists.

People who have home pages that I have liked, and people that I like who have home pages:

• David Bacon is one of my oldest friends. Among his many brilliant achievements over the 20 years I've known him is the creation of this wonderful Star Trek/Looney Toons Crossover, born in email in the early 1980's and given new life thanks to the advent of cheap multimedia on the net.
• Charlotte Blackmer's Berkeley Farm and Pleasure Palace is someplace you should visit, even if it is in California.
• Warren Cheney's homepage has some links to his excellent writings. Tom-Bob says "check it out."
• The lord of the flies, Mark Garfinkel .
• Jeem.
• Anmar Mirza , cave man, bikerbabe. Woo, woo!
• Marina Picciotto at the Yale Department of Pharmacology.
• That damned elusive piglet .
• Stainless Steel Rat, who is the one who collected the Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations, a copy of which I swiped and stored here.
• Trish Roberts . Well, calling her a freend might be stretching it. She thinks cilantro is an edible herb. Eeeeeew.
• Visit the homepage of Debbie Schwartz, Sniggler extraordinaire.

Miscellany:

• Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations
• Want to know where your dollar bills go when you buy stuff? Visit Where's George and start tracking them.

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Bye now.

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